Regulatory standards such as those of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”) and non-regulatory standards such as those of the American National Standards Institute (“ANSI”) require that personal protective equipment, including personal fall arrest equipment, be periodically inspected and maintained. As a result of these standards personal fall arrest equipment and other types of personal protective equipment include labeling and markings identifying the equipment and its inspection history. Inspection agencies, such as OSHA, strongly recommend that businesses using personal protective equipment create, maintain and use inspection logs for this equipment.
By way of example personal fall arresting equipment is often labeled and marked through the use of physical tags that have information identifying the equipment and its inspection history written or otherwise inscribed on them in either a human readable or bar code format. In either case, these tags can become illegible over time due to environmental conditions in which the fall arrest equipment is used or due to a lack of care of this equipment. As a result, these tags can become useless for the purpose of identifying specific items of personal fall arrest equipment and their inspection history. Thus, inadequacies of current labeling practices adversely affect the ability of users of personal protective equipment to quickly and positively identify individual items of this equipment as required for inspection, maintenance, security and record keeping.
Radio Frequency Identification Device (“RFID”) technology has been developed in recent years and used for many purposes. Systems based on RFID technology use small, inexpensive identification tags that are transponders having antenna that receive radio frequency signals from a scanner and in response transmit stored data that are received by the scanner. Data can be stored on transponders in a “read-only” format that cannot be changed by the scanner, or in a “read/write” format that can be received and changed by a scanner on a transponder, or data can be stored in both formats. RFID devices are also used with computerized databases that store information relating to items with which the RFID systems are used and receive and process related information from the scanner.